Julia Holter

i honestly thought it was kind of...melody-averse. i spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen. not as much as on tragedy though.

a couple of the songs near the end are better.

I'm pretty adverse to 'ethereal vocals' in general, but I quite like this. Sound great over my morning coffee, making breakfast - I always need records like that :)

"four gardens" is my favorite on this i think

i keep singing the "many many moons" bit to myself

i honestly thought it was kind of...melody-averse. i spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen

It's not melody averse at all, but the songs are sort of structured like classical pieces where the really obvious melodies aren't necessarily there and upfront and centre, it takes time to reach them. I'm thinking of songs like 'Fur Felix', where it plays around over the top of that cello figure for ages and then consolidates into this really lovely repeated refrain, and then it starts undercutting it and breaking it up.

I can understand not really liking the aesthetic, but she knows exactly what she's doing. It's really light in terms of production and arrangement but there's a lot going on, it's not slight at all. Way better than the other 4AD artists mentioned on this thread.

Even the ambient bits feel a lot more purposeful than most ambient does, like the chords are drifting towards something.

a couple of the songs near the end are better.

Hah, the last song is my least favourite, I think she falls down when she picks up the pace and volume a bit.

I saw she tweeted yesterday that she was listening to Laurie Anderson for the first time, since the name comes up so often in reviews.

this cokemachineglow review is amazing/terrible!

http://www.cokemachineglow.com/record_review/6864/juliaholter-ekstasis-2012

discussion on its terribleness here: pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

found ekstasis dull (gave it only a couple cursory listens), like a really flacid broadcast-like music. wanted to like it cuz she's mad cute and champions michael pisaro's music. maybe it grows?

totally grows...love it to death now (took about 4 full spins)

this cokemachineglow review is amazing/terrible!

Ha, I think I'll go on the "amazing" side! Actually I thought it was a good piece and certainly made me want to listen to the album - which is kind of the point.

really liking what i've heard so far. think the "experimental" angle is getting way overbilled. outside of a few sonics, its really more just quirky pop.

jfc, marcello, this is a line from that review:

Holter’s vacuous constructions are left bare to naturally solidify in the tentative advance of dawn, and with the light comes a clouds-parting revelation of latent songwriting talent and preternatural concepts concerning variances in sound and texture.

Which is to say it’s about as cerebral an approach to what amounts to a fairly streamlined avant-pop record as you could imagine, with Holter nimbly folding in left-field referents and heady conceits until lines have been blurred and the results regurgitated as pure manifestations of sonic poetry at the direct inception of indecipherability.

haha contenderizer i known, it's hard to deliberately write as inscrutably as certain folks do almost naturally.

er, i know.

lol @ "vaingloriously referential word salad", respect

Some friends of mine made this video for her at the wolf in DTLA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H8x-6VHORLU#!

"To naturally solidify" is a split infinitive. Using "regurgitated" and "pure" in the same sentence is a contradiction in terms. A keen editor would have spotted both and sorted them out.

However, as I said, the review was sufficiently interesting for me to want to check out the record, unlike the red-nosed clowning of what Owen P called the "book burning THIS IS SHIT" attitude which clearly isn't confined to the UK.

"To naturally solidify" is a split infinitive

nothing wrong with a split infinitive if it makes the rhythm of the sentence sound better. both "to solidify naturally" and "naturally to solidify" sound much worse. the guiding principle should be euphony.

in the fuss over cokemachineglow dude's bad writing let us not forget his repulsive attitude that was the reason he was called out at all

Nothing wrong with "to boldly go" either but "to naturally solidify," to use a journalistic expression, halts the flow of prose.

"repulsive attitude"?

Marcello, FYI: pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

The "blue collar readers" remark is asinine, especially if meant ironically, i.e. "let's make our posts easy for oiks to read." But I'm an oik, albeit one who benefited from the wonders of the Scottish education system (which is not to deny its dark side of religious segregation, but that's another argument for another thread), who had great, encouraging parents, teachers and tutors right through school and university. With my blog writing I certainly assume a level of shared knowledge - knowing who's reading or who's likely to read the blog - but I never, ever talk down to my readers as though neither brains nor Google existed.

However:

The superiority complex of wannabe highbrows who can't even craft readable prose is reliably repulsive.

This reads like highbrow contempt for those whom Sir Alastair Burnet used to call "plain people" (Translation: "stay in your corner and know your place, oiks"). And bad alliteration.

beautiful album

i tried this again, still can't get into it. feels really passionless to me, no blood and guts or emotional pull - kind of fussy and prissy :(

It's a grower. But I am not sure if this record works so easily for everybody.

What's she currently like live? Playing at a more classically-oriented concert space w/Mike Koldin tonight, mildly curious.

just saw her this past tuesday at the media club in vancouver. pretty much stands behind her keyboard and plays. voice was really strong and i enjoyed her jerky dance moves. she appears shy & does not address the audience a whole lot. glad i saw her though.

I thought this album was really sleepy and pitch-shifted, and it turns out I've just been playing the records at the wrong speed.

It sounded good, though!

she played worthless UK festival Field Day yesterday and was told to leave the premises immediately afterwards to free up space in the car park: https://twitter.com/JULIA_HOLTER/status/208975662994825216

wow that's terrible

That's preeeeeetty shitty. I was at Field Day, she was grrrreat opening the day (yeah, not doing much unexpected, but her singing especially really struck me), and it was all a bit downhill from there. Not drastically so, and it was actually a bit better organised than I expected (having heard so many horror stories), but I don't imagine I'll be back.

Completely understand their request. Would have made it prior to her set, though.

Actually, been listening a bit more and she isn't as bad as all that. Quite like some of this stuff in fact, doh.

the album is really growing on me, thought it was a bit aimless and too drifty at first. i really love "boy in the moon".

Had high hopes for this record since Cole MGN was involved

http://michaelpisaro.blogspot.com/2012/08/announcing-gw-008-and-gw-009.html

'ekstasis' sounds even better in the winter

briefly lambent rays piercing the boiling clouds of vaingloriously referential word salad

I've been coming back to Ekstasis and liking it even more. Definitely one of the albums of 2012 for me.

This is a wonderful record.

I think it's awesome. I went home over Christmas and played it to my parents cos I thought they'd be into it and my mum said it sounded like Enya :(

enya is awesome!

someone posted a song from this on tumblr and i really liked the track in isolation, but i couldn't really get into the album

My teenaged son asked for Ekstasis for Christmas. I haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but I like the bits I've heard. I can understand the Enya comparison, haven't heard anything that reminds me of Broadcast yet.

this plane is taking... off.

ekstasis probably by most-listened-to album of 2012, unless you count that le1f mix which i dunno is that an "album"?

It's Enya on drugs

the song structures are more interesting than enya's

xpost- hi jay vee! i'm just an offended flute fan having a goof. pay me no mind.

m bison-
i think it's an important part of the discourse to try + figure out where stuff came from. sighting medulla as a possible source is more than valid with that song. (i get that medulla wasn't the first or best or anything, but in a pop music context, the rules changed a bit after that album)

on that note, i will take this opportunity to bring up skin diver by nona hendryx. i only heard it for the first time in the past few years, but it immediately sounded like a distant relative of julia holter's music. the new album has solidified that for me.

+on that note, it blew my mind to find steve tibbetts on one of her artist-curated playlists last album cycle. idk why that's so entertaining to me. i found tibbetts years before holter, but the connection makes immediate sense.

If anyone here wants two tickets to her London show on the 9th let me know (and give me some way to contact you). I’ve got to be in Scotland for a funeral. Not looking for any money, just want the tickets to be enjoyed, gutted I can’t make it.

"Meyou" reminds me a bit of Meredith Monk's stuff, which of course inspired Medúlla, so cosign I guess

can recommend catching her on tour for this, live set up for the new songs was pretty incredible; Dev Hoff killing it on fretless bass especially. did a beautiful rendition of Meyou with Jenny Hval and her band too, though I think that was a London treat.

Gorgeous new album. The title track is a melange (no Dune) of just about everything I could want in new music. That is all.